Kolia (10 page)

THE ZONE

ON JUNE 20, 1992,
Kolia picked the wrong guy to tangle with. He had spotted a man on the platform wearing a white dress shirt and sporting an expensive wristwatch. He closed his book and followed him. As the man was about to board the train, Kolia employed his standard modus operandi —
Oh, I'm sorry. Pardon
me —
only this time, the instant he had liberated the watch, the man pulled out a pair of handcuffs and arrested him. Kolia did as he was told and accompanied the policeman to a waiting car, his guilt this time indisputable. Sitting in the back seat, the idea that his life had a certain tragic symmetry to it didn't even occur to him; his mind was too busy replaying what had just taken place on the platform. He needed to know where his technique had gone wrong.

He didn't spend much time in the detention centre. Kolia's name ensured that he received legal representation and a quick appearance before a judge. That was welcome news, the conditions in the SIZO were deplorable — fifty men, all awaiting trial, packed into a cell that stank of shit and piss and vomit and other things best left undescribed. Kolia was permitted one shower and no mattress. He slept on the floor, next to a man who had been rotting away in there for nine months, while he waited for his Last Judgement. The man coughed incessantly.

“I finally caved in and signed the paper,” he said. “First they tie your hands behind your back and push you to the ground so you're lying face down. Then they stick your head in a plastic bag and hold it there until you pass out. They call it the
slonik
. They did it to me three times, the bastards. I signed. I have to get out of here — prison is like paradise compared to this.”

Kolia wasn't tortured. He didn't have to submit to the so-called elephant technique. He was transferred to a prison camp near Rostov. When he argued that stealing from the rich on the platform of a railway station was a more noble pursuit than stealing from a mother of three young children in a grocery store, the judge countered that, notwithstanding, he had been playing the petty thief for quite some time now. They had had him under surveillance. Now he would serve as an example to others, and he wouldn't be seeing the free world again for at least a year.

When he arrived in the Zone, after a medical exam, he put on his prison uniform: black pants and shirt, with his name pinned below his right shoulder. His head was shaved and he was given a black cap. His bunkmates were real monsters — rapists and murderers who would likely never be released. Their beds were furnished with thin burnt-orange quilts. There was a barred window at each end of the room, which helped to relieve the oppressive decor.

During the day, inmates did maintenance chores. Working in pairs, they washed floors with a rag and a bucket of water between them. Sometimes they would be dispatched to the factory that operated within the walls of the Zone or to a neighbouring worksite with a pickaxe and a wheelbarrow. They ate their meals out of a billy can in the mess hall. By the end of the first month, the hard block of bread that was served every day started to taste like chalk. The older inmates referred to it as “the sledgehammer.” The men washed themselves with cloths, standing on stone benches because the floor of the bathhouse was rotten, or under the grimy spray of showers whose copper fixtures had long since turned a putrid green. A new arrival had to watch his step if he wanted to avoid the sexual advances of a lifer who coveted his ass. Inmates divided their free time between the common yard, and the visiting room, where a plate of glass kept them separated from their loved ones. There was also a private room for couples.

No one escapes from the Zone. Inmates are more or less free to wander in the open space at its centre, as they do in the camps, but the perimeter is guarded like a gold mine and it is unassailable. Those who get out before serving their full sentence do so feet first, victims of AIDS or tuberculosis. The Zone is Russia's Third World.

Igor would only stop talking long enough to spit on the ground. In spite of his plodding bulk and constant coughing and spitting, he was one inmate that Kolia really liked. His stories went nowhere but somehow they seemed to protect him from going crazy.

One evening, after finishing their grub, Igor asked Kolia a question.

“Do you know why winter is longer in certain parts of Siberia?”

“'Cause it's winter?”

“Nope. Do you know why bulls and cows don't have any front teeth, just like you?”

“Because that's just the way it is.”

Igor, content with Kolia's ignorance, began to
hold forth, chewing on a green twig between pro-
nouncements.

“There's a legend told by the Yakut people about a bull and a stallion who had a disagreement over which season was the best.”

He spat on the ground.

“The stallion preferred the summer because his hooves didn't freeze.”

“Shuddup, Igor!” Sasha piped in. He did business with the outside.

Igor ignored him and carried on with his tale.

“The bull thought that winter was the best season. The two of them argued so much that day that the stallion finally kicked the bull right in the kisser, knocking out six of his teeth. The bull saw red and charged the stallion, puncturing the horse's belly with his horns and ripping out his gallbladder. And guess who shows up then? None other than Toyon, the supreme ruler of Nature, who oversees the whole shebang from his house in the ninth heaven, next to the Lake of Milk.”

Igor spat on the ground again. He liked to mark off his territory. Before continuing his story, he closed a nostril with his index finger and shot the contents of his nose to the ground — a technique referred to by yogis as “the stomach pump.”

“Toyon had to settle the argument. In his opinion, the stallion had come out of the whole thing pretty well and would certainly be less cantankerous, now that he had no gall bladder. But he decided in favour of the bull, saying, ‘From this day forward, summer in Siberia will be shorter than winter.'”

“Kolia, every time you take your dentures out, you make me think of that bull!”

Kolia didn't mind Igor's asinine stories; he was probably the nicest guy in the Zone. He was an inept thief, meek enough to find himself repeatedly sodomized, but not at all dangerous.

Kolia commanded respect from the other inmates because he knew how to make them laugh. Some of them had even seen him perform when they were kids and their parents had taken them to the circus. Seeing Kolia in his black prison garb was, to say the least, a surprise. When he spoke, everyone went quiet and listened attentively. When they asked for a magic trick, he always obliged. His biggest hit inside the Zone was the second sketch he had performed as part of his audition for the School of Circus Arts. It comprised all the essential moves in a pickpocket's arsenal, and Kolia remembered every element of the routine. After serving six months of his sentence, he began to question whether he could ever return to the ring once he left prison. He decided that would never happen.

When someone asked him where he was born, Kolia would answer, “Somewhere farther away than you can imagine.” Anyone who wanted to know the reason for his imprisonment was told that he started stealing at the age when children learn to read. No one pressured him for an answer. He was well liked and he had the distinction of being the inmate with the fewest tattoos — but one of the very few who bore a serial number from the camps on his forearm. That was a tattoo he hadn't asked for. The only person he spoke to about the camp, his mother, and Iosif was the other Kolia.

He slept in the same dormitory. He was thirty years younger than Kolia and was serving time for having openly expressed his desire to leave the army. In the Zone, he was being raped on a weekly schedule by a fat man in his sixties who hailed from Saint Petersburg. When he had pleaded with the guards to do something, his pleas were met with a deaf ear. It was none of their business. They weren't paid enough to patrol the sexual antics of every single prisoner.

The young man told Kolia that he reminded him of his father, who was a violin maker. The resemblance was perhaps tenuous, but what was absolutely definitive was the young deserter's death. In exchange for cigarettes, someone had provided the weapon which allowed him to escape the security perimeter without ever stepping foot outside the Zone.

Masha came to visit Kolia. She brought him dried fruit, nuts, some books, and tobacco for bartering. There was colour in her cheeks, and Kolia was happy to see that.

“I'm eating for you,” she announced with a grin.

Bravo
, Kolia thought,
she's eating
. He was only half listening to what she had to say. He was no longer in the habit of paying attention to anything. She mentioned that she had found a buyer for the dacha, and Kolia wondered what dacha she was referring to. She said she was going to move to Moscow soon to take up a teaching position. Kolia congratulated her and realized he had no idea what he was going to do once he got out of the Zone. She suggested that he come to Moscow with her.

“I'll see after the dacha is sold,” he said.

“I'm sure they'll take you back at the circus. Everything's moving so fast, now.”

“In Moscow? They'd never take me back. And besides, I wouldn't go back if they asked me.”

“Well, you're not growing any new hair,” she said, half smiling.

“No hair, no lice,” Kolia replied.

She passed him the bag of dried fruit.

“Kids are all watching Walt Disney movies now to improve their English. They're hugely popular. And all the mothers want their husbands to go into
beezness
.”

“That's ‘business.' There are a lot of guys in here who do very good business.”

A guard put his hand on Kolia's shoulder. Time was up. He was escorted back to the barracks.

Masha boarded the train to Moscow the same day. It departed Rostov and headed due north until it reached its destination, a thousand kilometres away from the colony.

ENCORE

SHE HAD RENTED A CAR,
and now waited for him to emerge from behind the gate. The road out of the Zone presented a clear choice: turn left and head deeper into the country or turn right in the direction of Moscow. The day was dry and clear. It hadn't rained in over a week, and the trees and grass were in rough shape. So was Kolia. He had developed the same allergic reaction to the prison uniform as he'd had in the camp, and his thighs and forearms were covered in large red patches. He couldn't stop scratching.

In Rostov, she bought him some ointment and a sandwich, which he carefully took apart to savour the tastes of the sliced meat, lettuce, tomato, and even the butter on the bread. He scratched himself and burst out laughing. Masha scolded him for wiping his greasy fingers on the upholstery. Kolia ate a piece of chocolate. He fell asleep as the sky darkened into night. They arrived in Moscow the next day.

The city had changed. Chic boutiques had sprouted up everywhere. Masha drew a modest income from her new teaching job, and she took charge of the shopping. She knew all the latest brands and could navigate the aisles full of pricey and frivolous merchandise to find the essentials — if they weren't out of stock. To Kolia, these stores were suffocating. He was already set in his ways. He knew the products he liked, the things a man needed to live well.

The tiny kitchen was almost entirely taken up by the table. Kolia slept in the living room, which wasn't much bigger. Masha slept in the one bedroom. With the sale of the dacha, Kolia was finally able to relax. He was fifty-six, with a partial denture and an odd-looking face that he had come to tolerate. He had done time in the camps and the Zone, he had worked in the sewers of Moscow and in its circus. He'd rarely had the luxury of choice and now he was tired.

PART FOUR

THE WORLD IN A BLACK BOX

HE LEFT THE TELEVISION ON
day and night. He ate with it, laughed at it, and pleasured himself to it, before falling asleep. He immersed himself in it so completely that he began to hear the theme songs to his favourite shows in his dreams.

Sometime during the winter of 1994, he received a letter that had been addressed to him in Rostov and then forwarded to Moscow by the new owners of the dacha. It was from Iosif's sister. He hadn't spoken to Tanya in a generation.

The letter was written in French. Reading a letter composed in the language of his former mentor was no longer an easy task. He spent an entire afternoon deciphering her handwriting, comparing
i
's with
l
's,
a
's with
o
's, and sometimes
r
's and
i
's because she didn't dot them and left the tail off her
a
's. She hadn't lost her dramatic style or her poetic flair. Her letter began with a line of poetry in Russian, taken from the
The Voronezh Notebooks
by Osip Mandelstam: Да, я лежу в земле, губами шевеля.

In the envelope, he found a newspaper clipping about a German filmmaker by the name of Hans-Jürgen Schaeffer. In her letter she didn't mention the clipping, but talked about the birth of her daughter in 1969 and her subsequent divorce. She had invited Kolia to celebrate the new year, which was now well past. She had also included her phone number.

He said nothing to Masha. The next day, he began to dial the number, but the receiver slipped out of his sweaty palms. He would call her on the weekend. On Sunday, calling her felt too much like a chore, and he put it off till Monday. On Tuesday, he drank a beer first and then hung up as soon as he heard a woman's voice. On Wednesday, on the verge of a heart attack, he finally dusted off his French. On Friday, he pulled on a pair of his most presentable black jeans and a grey T-shirt — on which he'd had printed the words
My hand in your pocket
— grabbed his Walkman and a New Order tape and left the apartment, completely forgetting to comb his hair.

He found Tanya Branch sitting in the cafe they had agreed upon.

She kissed him.

“Did you read it? Have you seen the film?”

Tanya didn't ask him anything at all about his life or tell him anything about hers. All she could talk about was her rediscovery of Mandelstam. Her familiarity with the poet surprised him — from memory she recited the poem “
Yes, I'm lying in the earth, moving my lips
” in both Russian and French, providing her own translation. Then she launched into a discussion of the director in the newspaper clipping and his “oeuvre.” The film in question had played in Moscow at the beginning of the year. At least a quarter century had passed without them saying a single word to each other, and all she wanted to talk about was this man. For a moment, Kolia wondered if Iosif hadn't assumed a new identity in Germany. But that was not the case. Tanya answered his question before he could even formulate it.

Yes, he'd read the article. Yes, there was a
certain
similarity between his life and the events portrayed in the film, but nothing more than that. No, he hadn't seen the film. It had stopped playing in Moscow a month and a half ago. He had checked.

“It's obvious that you haven't seen it.” She handed him a videocassette. “This is it. Do you have a VCR?”

“No.”

“We can look at it at my place. My daughter's staying over at her fiancé's tonight.”

He followed her. She lived in a two-bedroom flat, and had her own kitchen and shower. The ceiling was low and the walls were white, except in the kitchen where her daughter smoked. In the living room, there was a map of the world with coloured thumbtacks pressed into it, pinpointing several cities in Russia and a few locations in the West. Yellow somewhere in Switzerland, purple for Moscow, red at Magadan. There was a pink thumbtack placed in the middle of western Siberia. A black one in Romania.

He asked her if her daughter travelled a lot. Tanya looked at him, astonished. No, of course not. She switched on the VCR, slid in the cassette, flicked the TV to the right channel, and then dimmed the lights and sat down on the sofa, tucking one leg under the other and popping a stick of Wrigley's in her mouth. For the first half an hour, she popped a bubble every thirty seconds.

Kolia watched as the story of his childhood was told by another man. The film was in German, but the Russian subtitles made it obvious that the director leaned towards melodrama. He had something of a reputation for producing “docu-fiction” and for being a bit of a megalomaniac. He considered himself to be another Werner Herzog. The film was shot in Poland and depicted the harsh life in Siberian work camps. The way the hierarchy of the camps was portrayed lacked subtlety — the brutes were simply brutes, the prisoners were all hopeless imbeciles. But there was absolutely no doubt in Kolia's mind that the protagonist was him.

At the end of the credits, he sat up and flexed the arm he'd been leaning on. It had gone to sleep. He didn't know what to say. He didn't understand. He waited until she spoke. Tanya explained that after reading the article in the newspaper last year, she had contacted the journalist who wrote it. He agreed to forward a letter to the filmmaker on her behalf. The director had come to Moscow to meet her and had described exactly how he stumbled across her brother. At the same time as his official disappearance in 1953, Iosif had successfully entered the Red Army — thanks to his benefactor in the camp — and then he made his way to Romania in the winter of that year. It was in Romania two years later that the filmmaker met Iosif, who had talked at length about Kolia, his birth in the Kolyma camp, teaching him French, and so on.

“Where is he now?”

“Iosif is dead, Kolia.”

“When did he die?”

“Schaeffer said he died in 1955.”

“How does he know?”

“He found him.”

“What do you mean he
found
him?”

“Well, he found him.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Iosif committed suicide, Kolia.”

“I want to know how he died. It's been forty years, but I want to know.”

“He didn't tell me. I have his number in Berlin. He speaks Russian but not French.”

She lit a cigarette. He took a shot of vodka to dampen the shock. He asked her if she needed anything, if things were going okay for her. As an answer, she kissed him, forcing her tongue into his mouth. Kolia pushed her back, but she persisted. When she grasped his sex with her teeth through the fabric of his jeans, he gave in. It felt like an eternity since a woman had thrown herself on top of him.

The cumulative effect of the film, their discussion afterwards, and now Tanya lying there beside him made Kolia feel like his whole world was coming undone. He got up and got dressed. She stopped him at the door.

“You're forgetting the director's phone number.”

“I've got it memorized. You know that.”

“Put it in your pocket.”

He asked her if she could still pull some strings for him.

“If I need to get to Romania, can you help me?”

“Yeah, it's easy now.”

“I just got out of prison.”

She let out a gust of disappointment.

“What did you do to wind up in there?”

“I got caught doing a little pickpocketing at the train station,” he said, pointing to his T-shirt.

“It's doable,” she said.

He gave her two quick pecks on the cheek, and took a taxi home.